As the credits rolled on Get Smart, I thought to myself: "Ah. Well that makes sense." The missing piece to the puzzle? Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, the creators of the original series, served as consultants on the film. My guess is that they're the reason things in the film, although silly, never got too over-the-top, and that as things began to near the top, there was just a little bit of restraint used.

Which isn't to say that Hollywood's latest Steve Carell-powered vehicle doesn't have its share of contrived humor: dudes kissing dudes, pratfalls, vomit, and the like. But all in all, Get Smart was far, far better than I expected, remaining faithful to its source material while all the time acknowledging that things have changed quite a bit from the sixties, when the original show was produced and set.

The movie begins in Washington D.C., where Steve Carell walks through the Natural History Museum (which, oddly, is housing some American History artifacts, as well—perhaps because that museum is currently closed for renovations?) to get to CONTROL headquarters, which lays, conveniently enough, beneath the Smithsonian's CONTROL exhibit. As a curator explains to a tour group that CONTROL was disbanded after the Cold War, Carell smiles a knowing smile and heads downstairs, right into a re-staging of the original opening credits. Although it's been updated to reflect thirty years of technological advances, the sequence is reassuringly familiar.

From there, it's more of the same: a plot and characters that we know, played by well-cast and well-known actors (Anne Hathaway, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Alan Arkin, David Koechner, James Caan, and Masi Oka, to name a few). Those things that are different are explained without getting too pedantic, and often with a good sense of humor. To explain the disparity in age between Agent 99 (Hathaway) and Maxwell Smart (Carell), we discover that 99 has recently undergone major plastic surgery, during which she asked the doctor to "shave off a few years" (who wouldn't?). The shoe phone, so important in the original series, is present here as a museum relic, passed over in favor of cell phones but still ultimately important to the plot. And there are still the same ridiculous gadgets that fans of the show have come to expect, like a watch that detects radioactive activity (also leading to a couple of jokes) and a swiss army knife equipped with mini crossbow and flamethrower. The latter might be a bit over-used (how many times do we need to see Carell shoot darts through his nose before we get the point?), but it nevertheless arouses the imagination of an audience starved, in a Bond-less summer, for clever toys and exciting chase and fight scenes that balance punches and punchlines.

If you're looking for a great work of American cinema, look elsewhere. But if you're looking for laughs this summer, Get Smart is certainly one way to get them.